Ranching in the Bad Lands. 3 1 



and the true old Rocky Mountain hunter and trapper, 

 the plainsman, or mountain-man, who, with all his faults, 

 was a man of iron nerve and will, is now almost a thing of 

 the past. In the place of these heroes of a bygone age, 

 the men who were clad in buckskin and who carried long 

 rifles, stands, or rather rides, the bronzed and sinewy cow- 

 boy, as picturesque and self-reliant, as dashing and reso- 

 lute as the saturnine Indian fighters whose place he has 

 taken ; and, alas that it should be written ! he in his turn 

 must at no distant time share the fate of the men he has 

 displaced. The ground over which he so gallantly rides 

 his small, wiry horse will soon know him no more, and in 

 his stead there will be the plodding grangers and husband- 

 men. I suppose it is right and for the best that the great 

 cattle country, with its broad extent of fenceless land, over 

 which the ranchman rides as free as the game that he follows 

 or the horned herds that he guards, should be in the end 

 broken up into small patches of fenced farm land and 

 grazing land ; but I hope against hope that I myself shall 

 not live to see this take place, for when it does one of 

 the pleasantest and freest phases of western American life 

 will have come to an end. 



The old hunters were a class by themselves. They 

 penetrated, alone or in small parties, to the farthest and 

 wildest haunts of the animals they followed, leading a soli- 

 tary, lonely life, often never seeing a white face for months 

 and even years together. They were skilful shots, and 

 were cool, daring, and resolute to the verge of reckless- 

 ness. On any thing like even terms they very greatly 

 overmatched the Indians by whom they were surrounded. 



